Sunday, September 27, 2009

FIRST OF ALL, which marketers are doing this? Sure, you'll see some foods that clearly should not have fat in them being marketed as fat-free, but that's because some foods do have fat. I recognize that using asbestos is clearly just an exaggeration, but I don't quite know what he's making fun of. This isn't some massive sudden trend in marketing, and to the extent that products say they are ___-free, they are usually things that one could reasonably expect to be there, some of the time.

The punchline is also poorly executed, and here's how you know: What is the punchline? Is it "asbestos-free"? If so, the text at the bottom is needless, and given that it has no humor content of its own. It just felt like wanted a caption for the sake of having a caption, and couldn't think of anything good. Maybe he should have combined it with the alt-text joke: Have one of the boxes labeled "Asbestos Free!" one labeled "Swine Flu Free!" and one with, I dunno, "Rat Brain Free!" and then the caption could be something about how it's just so hard to pick cereals these days, they all have so many advantages.

The fact that the cereal names themselves are as bland as their contents just shows how far we've come since Randall made up funny cereal name parodies [incidentally, of those six, I like the three on the right, because they are actually clever puns on existing cereals]. That is, I assume there are no jokes in the names - if I'm missing something do let me know.

OH HEY then there's another problem: SMBC did this joke way better. Two years ago. Here'sthe link. Notice how it's better? How it uses the far funnier "skin from a dead hobo's mouth"? Yeah. SMBC is way better, in general. Why does Zach Weiner like xkcd so much? This is one of those eternal puzzles.

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ALRIGHT. I'm taking off regular blogging for a week. Person #1, the editor of the xkcdsucks book, will take two days. I've instructed him to post the pdf of the book for you all to enjoy (It's been posted around before, but let's get it up in a post). Then Kirk will do the last day. Fun times! I will still be around, and I hope to write a post about all the new (non-book) stuff in the xkcd store.

When I first read the comic, I assumed that they were all named to show a company's need to gain the upper-foot among it's look-alikes.

Similar to the SMBC comic, without the labels, you'd have no idea which one to pick, as they're all copies of each other.

Overall, it's a witty statement as opposed to a joke. A lot of XKCD seems to be that, so I think we should look upon this change with our heads held high with pride! After all, change is growth, and growth is good :).

Sorry for the flimsy excuse of an XKCD defence. I'll try to do better in the future.

Randall's is a competently executed version of an old, only borderline-amusing observation. To say that the SMBC is better is a bit of a stretch, really. It suffers some of the same problems (a caption needlessly explaining what the joke is, for instance) and the art, while colourful, is deficient in different ways to Xkcd. Those jars of jellies sure look strangely empty. 'Asbestos-free' certainly isn't tremendously amusing, but at least it's vaguely related, I guess, to real social fears. SMBC's hobo skin is of course completely unrealistic but I would challenge that it's really much funnier than asbestos -- 'dead hobo' is pretty juvenile, it's not very clever or sophisticated, that's for sure.

It's also off the mark to accuse, either expressly or implicitly, Xkcd of 'ripping off' SMBC. It's not a novel observation at all. The Mad Men pilot, for example, which aired not long before the SMBC strip, highlighted this very same marketing tactic.

So, in summary, this strip suffers not really because of its execution (the caption though is a big negative, but on the upside the title-text is OK), but because the subject matter just isn't very funny. Carl's suggestion, though, is certainly superior to both the Xkcd and Smbc versions.

"Which marketers are doing this?" There are sugar packages saying "Sugar contains no fat!" Also, there is toothpaste saying "all the fluoride is 100% in ionic form" which is a good thing, because otherwise it would be a poisonous gas.

Randall, get a life. Get out of the Internet. That starry-eyed naïve idealism is old and ANNOYING. Give it up, it won't happen. You're sinking as low as the writers of Mary Sue fanfiction on the Harry Potter section of fanfiction.net, maybe even lower.

The thing that pisses me off most about the newest xkcd is that the girl would rather bitch on her blog about how the guy isn't talking to her than, you know, take some fucking initiative and start a conversation herself.

It's like the xkcd definition of a romantic is someone supposed to just sit and sigh longingly and hope someone will happen to them. The only people I've seen in xkcd who are actually depicted as being assertive in terms of starting relationships are Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend, who are maniacal (but lovable!) sociopaths.

You know, Fernie creeps me out. Annoyingly dismissing every bit of criticism someone throws at a comic one day and being one of the comic's harshes critics the next is weird. People are able to change their mind, of course, but someone who does such a 180 within a few days is either lying or a psychopath. Or Fernie, I guess.

Exactly, aloria. Obviously you would automatically fail at any social interaction--therefore you're exempt from the responsibility to try!

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It's possible that Randall is actually writing against this view. He certainly isn't portraying this sort of frightened non-flirting as how people ought to behave. But the sheer fact that nobody in his comics can interact sociably is a bit bizarre. (Mr. Hat, while proactive, is still a loathsome sociopath. He's gone from Colonel Jew Hunter to Shoshana Dreyfus.)

Of course, the reason Randall is never able to portray convincing proactive character interaction might just be that Randall is incapable of portraying two distinct characters.

I think he may be referring to the massive surge of companies calling their products "Trans Fat FREE!!1!" once it was determined that trans fat is bad for you. And that did happen, at least where I'm located.So, meh. This joke has been done before, but I probably would have laughed if he had executed it better. Regarding #642: I actually liked it in a way. Not really funny, but amusing...

"Randal's idea of flirting is calling someone's computer cute. I think this may explain some of his relationship problems."

Yeah, that too. It almost sounds like Randall is saying "hai guys i dun get it i called her netbook cute y is dat creepy???!?!?!??!???!??!", as if he REALLY doesn't get it. If I were a girl and some unknown guy did that to me, I'd have nightmares for weeks.

And if some webcomic author did that to my lady, I'd shove his volume 0 book up his ass.

I don't think saying "cute netbook" is that bad. If someone came up to me with that, and I wasn't interested in him, it would be pretty easy to brush him off by saying "thanks" and going back to what I was doing. If he kept talking, then I'd start to get annoyed, but it's pretty easy to blow somebody off saying "sorry, dude, I'm REALLY trying to get something done before a deadline."

The fact that the dude is stressing out THAT much over saying something as innocent as "cute netbook" is really sad. Netbooks are pretty new technology; it isn't unlikely that someone who saw one being used would want to ask about it. Hell, when I brought my EeePC into work, where everyone is a geek, lots of people wanted to play with it and ask questions.

"The fact that the dude is stressing out THAT much over saying something as innocent as "cute netbook" is really sad."

Okay, maybe it has to do with the fact that I live in a country like Brazil, but if you're a girl in a subway and a complete stranger sits next to you, looks down at you and says "hey, cute netbook", there's only one possible way you can interpret that: RUN.

Hell, come on, there must be at least a thousand better ways to approach a stranger in a subway other than addressing her with the word "cute". If you think that's innocent, perhaps it's because you're surrounded by the nicest people in the world, but not everyone is that lucky, you know... Besides, a cute NETBOOK? What makes a "cute" netbook? It wears ribbons, or something? I can understand a technology geek being quite impressed with one of those, but then, calling it "cute"? What comes next? "I have a netbook at home. I call her Sara. We do... things... together"?

Oh, and did I talk about the worst yet? How does the girl reply? "What." She says "WHAT." WHO THE HELL says that outside the Internet? Really, if THAT is how girls speak in his thoughts, the girl better stay the HELL away from him.

God, the more I look into it, the more disgusted I get. Randall, get out. Just out.

Well, I live in NYC, where people are generally dicks and evil and such, but if someone said "cute netbook," I'd assume it was because it was small (and small things are cute,) not read anything sketchy into it.

sje46: The thing is that a persona is still you asher1: are you shittign me sje46: Not at all asher1: so you think whoever is WMH is actually WMH asher1: and believes what WMH believes aloria: what asher said aloria: really? sje46: to a certain extent, yes sje46: he has to

Fernie I am not an idealist I just happen to think that humans are social creatures and 'talking to them' is not a creepy thing. Especially on public transit, where everyone is bored and a little conversation can make the trip a little more interesting.

Some of the best, and certainly the most memorable, conversations I've had have been with random street people, or at least people I didn't know at all. I've had evenings that would otherwise have been really mundane broken up by people who decided to strike up a conversation.

Is it idealistic to believe that when you choose to live in a city, somewhere with millions of people, that you might have to interact with some of them sometimes? That when you are in a public space, riding public transit, you might have to interact with the public?

And this is public transit, after all. You don't have to spend any time with these people. At the very most you might have ten minutes with them, and it's really easy to brush someone off if you don't want to talk.

And he's talking about a netbook. Even if you have a conversation, it doesn't need to go anywhere. I mean, I've had this conversation. It goes something like this:

"So, can you actually make real documents on this tiny machine?" "Yeah, it works pretty good. It takes a little getting used to the keyboard, but you can use it for most things." If you really want to engage them you can give a demonstration. If you don't think they'll grab and run you can even let them play around with it for a bit.

This is if you are feeling social and don't want to just say "Thanks," and repel anything further with "I'm kind of busy" or with unreceptive monosyllabic responses. And did I mention you are probably never going to see this person again? There is no commitment to these random conversations. All you are doing is deciding not to be misanthropic and actually having a real human conversation.

Sorry, this one was really funny.Punch line is that the "asbestos-free" cereal is the same as all the other cereals in the world, since all of them are asbestos-free.Marketing the obvious is annoying yet effective.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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